(Continued from Part 1)

Day 3

May 24 is a national holiday officially known as the Day of Bulgarian Education and Culture and Slavonic Alphabet, which we saw celebrated by enthusiastic youths on loud motorcycles and heard in the form of parades with chanting well into the night, sporadically until at least 3 AM. To be fair, they did not wake me up—I couldn’t sleep at all that night due to a combination of jet lag and excitement from the day.

We started with a visit to one of Silvia’s rose fields. Most of the Rosa damascena had been harvested, but she had requested the workers to leave us three rows of bushes to enjoy and finish picking those roses later. She even provided sun hats for all of us! We took advantage of the dazzling sunshine to take lots of photos and take in the beauty of the pink, spicy blooms through multiple senses. It was heartening to see that bees and other insects graced the flowers as well.

After returning to the hotel to change out of our muddy shoes, we had some free time, and my other half and I wandered around downtown Kazanlak. The market was abuzz with stalls selling handmade, rose-themed items. Sellers were not pushy at all, and people generally minded their own business.

I came across a crowded clothing store and decided to try shopping like the locals—fortunately, a shirt with colorful feathers on it jumped out at me from the crammed racks and I stood in line to try it on, then stood in line to buy it. At first, I was confused that nothing had a price tag on it; in fact, the shirt I was buying had no tags at all. I soon found out that everything was sold by weight. My shirt came out to just over 5 leva (about 3 US dollars). Hoping it wasn’t made in a sweat shop and trying not to think too hard on it, I later told our group about the experience and learned that these are second-hand shops and quite common in Bulgaria. (While we’re on the topic of clothing, both this and the new shirt I bought in Sofia featured exposed stitching at the hems… maybe that’s neither here nor there.)

We reconvened at the hotel to get down to business with the first part of the perfume-making workshop. Silvia told us more about her background and her family so we could have a better appreciation of what it takes to grow roses and produce rose oil, and we also learned about the major components of rose oil and lavender oil and some unique characteristics of Bulgarian products (the proportions of some components naturally vary from those of oils produced in other countries). Also, who knew that the Rosaceae family consisted of plants as diverse as roses, cherries, apples, and almonds? (I didn’t [although I knew about strawberries being related], but I do now!)

With this wonderful introduction, Sarah McCartney of 4160Tuesdays, this year’s guest perfumer at the Rose Retreat, began the workshop by letting us smell some creations that she had made featuring rose oil and other Bulgarian ingredients. I plan to write about the workshop in a separate post.

We had lunch in the hotel restaurant—many of us coveted the crème brûlée with rose water on the menu, but it was not available, so we settled for a tiramisu with pistachio cream topped with strawberries and mint.

The workshop continued after lunch. Most people in the group were exhausted after an intensive sniffing session and bailed on dinner a short walk away, which turned out to be an ironic experience in more ways than one (and in the best sense). The part I found most droll was this: not assuming that everyone in Kazanlak spoke English, I approached the restaurant host (who also turned out to be our server) with the question in Bulgarian, “Do you speak English?” Govorite li angliiski? “Da,” he replied while multitasking—yes. Not convinced that he had really heard me, I repeated, “Angliiski?” “Da, yes,” he replied. The rest of the interaction proceeded in English.

We had to wait a while for our outdoor table. When we were seated, the server asked if we smoked. “No,” we answered in unison. “That’s what I was thinking,” he said as he took away the ashtray. “You don’t look like people who smoke.” “I’ll take that as a compliment,” I muttered to my companions.

Then he brought us menus in Bulgarian, explaining that he didn’t have menus in English and that “the woman who speaks Bulgarian” could translate. We didn’t quite know what he meant, but he had rushed off, and we proceeded to struggle with a combination of Cyrillic transliteration and Google Lens translation until a woman from a nearby table came over and offered to help, which we gladly accepted.

We managed a delicious Italian-inspired meal with Bulgarian red wine and a very flavorful lemonade made with rose, lavender, ginger, and other ingredients I couldn’t decipher. When the server returned, he looked straight at me and started speaking in rapid-fire Bulgarian—probably asking if we were interested in dessert—I mustered, slowly, the other phrase I’d memorized: “I don’t speak Bulgarian.” Ne govorya bulgarski. The look on his face when he realized… I couldn’t have translated the menu!

(I took that as a compliment as well. Side note: I wasn’t as flattered in Sofia later—when I approached a cashier with a simple “Hello” in Bulgarian, she immediately responded, “Ah, you are not from here! Where do you come from?” and then marveled at how many American tourists she had encountered that day, as tourists were apparently more often not from the United States.)

He seemed so shocked, and then pulled out a chair to sit down and have an animated chat with us, apparently having no awareness that we’d been waiting a while for him to come so we could ask for the bill; instead, he seemed eager to teach us more Bulgarian. “‘Rose’ is roza, and ‘roses’ is rozi,” he told us. “Olio ot rozi means ‘oil from roses’.” His boss may not have been amused, but I certainly was!

Day 4

The first half of the day was spent finalizing our perfume creations. I’m not normally affected by smells of various aromachemicals, but I found myself starting to feel physically uncomfortable with the conglomeration of scents in the room, even with the window wide open. (I think I was feeling fragile because I had slept maybe 2 hours at most in the early morning after lying awake the previous night.) As soon as I finished mine, I snuck out of the workshop to crawl into bed for a nap. I skipped lunch—when they coincide, my need for sleep is always greater than my need for food.

Fortunately, my other half came in after lunch to wake me up, braving my grumpy, groggy antagonism to tell me that the group was leaving in a few minutes for a distillery tour. Finally, we would get to observe the first distillation of Rosa damascena at the distillery we had visited on Day 2!

We all took turns peering into the vat that had just been loaded up with rose blossoms. The sheer volume of roses was hard to fathom for someone seeing it at scale for the first time. Their one-way journey was sealed with the vat and the distillation process began.

At this point, I experienced something for which I was completely unprepared. The distillery space was filled with such a concentrated aroma of roses that I did not recognize it as rose—it overpowered my nose to the point of suffocation—so rich and thick, I may as well have been inside the vat with the flowers. I had to scurry outside for fresh air.

This was not what I expected or wanted. I wanted to love it, to find it blissful and sublime… but instead, I was retching and fighting back tears. I felt pathetic and saddened. Could I not fully love roses, after all?

To my surprise, Silvia came over and told me that she understood how overwhelming it was, that she had once wanted to escape the same scent, too. I hope that means that I can adapt to it if given another chance in the future, when I’m not sleep deprived. I could imagine a far less concentrated version of the aroma being quite moreish.

It didn’t seem to affect anyone else the same way, including my other half who has often said that aroma materials—both natural and synthetic—make his eyes burn (but not always). I asked others in the group how they would describe the scent. Toasty. Jammy. Caramellic, like baklava. I can only say it’s quite unforgettable.

The crowning highlight (pun entirely intended) was the gorgeous rose crowns that Silvia brought, which her father had made—naturally, Sarah was crowned the Rose Queen, and the rest of us took turns with the other crowns. Each takes a minimum of about 60 roses to make, and larger ones can take up to more than 200.

Later in the afternoon, we were treated to a scented sound bath with singing bowls and a decadent spread of rose blossoms and petals on the floor. At one point, while people were in various stages of consciousness, rose water was sprayed into the air around the room to enhance the olfactory part of the experience.

By now, the group’s energy levels were somewhat in sync and we agreed that dinner in the hotel restaurant was the way to go. This time, they had the crème brûlée with rose water. Worth the wait.

Day 5

The last day is always bittersweet as it involves goodbyes. Luckily for us, Sarah and her husband Nick rode with us in the van back to Sofia, so we were able to continue discussions about perfume making, the perfume industry, and other fun topics. It’s rare to meet someone as generous as Sarah with her time and hard-won knowledge.

I’ve already written about my brief gallivant in Sofia, but what I didn’t specify is that several of us who didn’t have to catch a plane the same day, after having said our farewells, decided spontaneously to meet up for one last dinner. My other half warned me not to make my posts about the Rose Retreat a love fest (I told him that of course it is, and he’s part of it!), but we’ve truly been in the company of a wonderful group of people that I miss already.

Many thanks and kudos to Silvia for organizing such a memorable week of activities, and to all who helped in the background to make everything seamless. Blagodarya!